Restoration of a Philco 16B Gerry O'Hara VE7GUH Jan 2009

	Restored Philco 16B.

A New Year Resolution and the Mother of all Tombstones

About 18 months ago Gerry spotted a Philco 16B 'tombstone' in one of the many fleamarket and antique mall type stores in Snohomish, Washington. This set is a 5 band, 11 tube monster of a tabletop radio, reported in Ron Ramirez's book on Philco Radios thus: "Excellent shortwave performance, pleasing tone, and good looks made the [Philco] Model 16 an outstanding set ... one of the best [domestic] shortwave radios ever made." - Gerry just had to have it!

On getting this set home and taking a closer look, it was apparent that no-one had ever had the chassis out of the case - no evidence of any replaced components or tinkering of any sort, indeed, once the layers of grime and fluff were removed the chassis looked in excellent condition.

Unfortunately not so the cabinet... it looked as if a (large) dog had used it regularly for clawing at. The chassis and speaker were removed from the cabinet and the mighty wooden case was taken along to the SPARC museum to see what could be done. After stripping the remnants of the old varnish off it was clear that the cabinet was in a very rough state. Some careful gluing was first undertaken on the cabinet top and side panels, followed by sanding and filling. The sides, top and main front panels are just plain poplar wood (hardly any grain to speak of), but with nice burl walnut 'cheeks' either side of the wonderful art deco speaker cut-out on the front panel. The original finish on the poplar panels is a very dark brown lacquer - almost. It was decided to try to reproduce the original colour scheme - the walnut 'cheeks' were therefore masked-off and the cabinet given many coats of dark brown lacquer in the spray booth at SPARC, with the masking tape/paper then being removed and final coats of only slightly tinted lacquer applied to the 'cheeks' and the rest of the cabinet. Finally, the gilt highlights were added along the three speaker grill 'uprights' and above/below the (original) 'Philco' logo. The cabinet now looking like new Gerry thought he would tackle the chassis...

The radio as found.

And the chassis.

Burl cheeks taped off.

Pat spraying the cabinet.

Some 18 months later, it was still on his workbench. So why was that? One reason is that he kept taking a peek at all those Bakelite capacitor cases underneath the chassis and he would get cold feet! - not that he had not tackled those gadgets before (he even bought a Philco 20 during that 18 months and re-capped it as a practice run). He also could not identify a couple of the Philco part numbers on the Bakelite capacitor cases, so he sent off for the excellent book on that subject entitled "Philco Condensers and More" by Ray Bintiff - problem solved. Then he thought he would send off for a batch of 'orange drops' rather than use the locally available 'cheapo' capacitors for such a prestigious set. They arrived, and Gerry ran out of excuses to procrastinate any longer.

Removing innards from a bakelite capacitor.

Inserting new components.

They're not all the same.

Restuffing a wax capacitor.

Stuffing the large can capacitor.

First, as always there was the need to make sure the power supply components were working ok and were safe - the frayed power cable was replaced, the on/off switch tested and then the power transformer was tested - all ok. It was getting late and Gerry thought he would leave the first of the capacitor replacements to the morning (he found that they take about 30 minutes each when he re-capped his Philco 20). Bad mistake - he lost momentum... then got pressured by his 'better half' to finish off one of my other long-term projects (a Silvertone lowboy) destined for his entrance hall, then a Zenith, a couple of Eddystones, then he bought a new sweep generator and played around with that, etc etc.

Completed chassis from front.

Completed chassis from rear.

Eventually Gerry removed the Philco chassis from his bench and it went to that dark and dank place of purgatory and doom.... 'under the bench' (you know the spot - where all those half-finished projects lurk, boxes of bits and bobs, an old compressor, coils of cable, etc etc. ). Finally it was New Year, 2009, time for a New Years resolution - most folks vow to give up smoking (but Gerry doesn't smoke), lose weight (he is not overweight), cut down on drinking (he did that years ago) and exercise more (hey come on... he is no angel) - so, this year Gerry decided to commit to having the Philco 16B fully restored before the end of January (2009 that is). Amazingly he did! - here is the chronology of the work:

• January 1: Committed to restoring the Philco 16B by January 31.
• January 4: Started to clear other projects off his workbench.
• January 7: Tidied up and lifted the Philco 16B chassis back onto the bench, dusted it off.
• January 10: Started poking around under the Philco chassis and looking at notes/schematic to figure out what he had done months ago (this is a problem when you leave things for extended time periods).
• January 23: Took another look at the Philco chassis. The one here is a 'Type 121' (an early version with a 'distant/local' switch) and all data Gerry had was for the later 'Type 124' and 'Type 125' chassis. A load more information was therefore downloaded from the internet and extracted from Riders, Beitmans etc. Some references noted that Type 121 had a different rectifier (Type 80), power transformer and smoothing caps to the later models. This was true, but Gerry also noticed several other differences in layout, capacitor reference numbers etc. After some deliberation, Gerry replaced the power supply electrolytics (he did not re-stuff the cans, but wired the new ones discretely under the chassis on a tagstrip and left the original cans in place for aesthetics). He eventually went off to bed around 3:00am having re-stuffed around 6 of the Bakelite-cased caps and replaced a couple of resistors that were found to be way out of tolerance.
• January 24: Re-stuffed the remaining Bakelite-cased caps, stuffed two tubular caps, replaced the three caps in the tone control switch.
• January 25: Pulled the tarry mess out of the large multiple bypass capacitor assembly (the large rectangular can on top of the chassis) - softening the tar with a heat-gun. Re-wired the tagstrip Paxolin end plate with new capacitors and installed on the chassis.
• January 26: Checked the wiring on the chassis and a few of the resistors he had not disconnected when replacing the caps. All were within tolerance. Checked the speaker and output transformer (Gerry had installed a 4 pin plug and socket some time back as he dislikes the captive wiring the set came supplied with as it meant the speaker had to be dragged around with the chassis and liable to get damaged on the workbench).
• January 27: A line fuse was installed on the rear chassis panel (there was already a hole suitable for this present) and an in-line HT fuseholder under the chassis, checked everything once more, plugged in the speaker, plugged in the 80 rectifier, wound up the variac and the HT came up to 350v and no smoke. Plugged in the rest of the tubes (all pre-tested), wound-up the voltage again on the variac, monitoring the HT volts and... it worked great! - talk about a great-sounding radio. Alignment on the Broadcast Band was spot on and the shortwaves were all fine too.
• January 28: Cleaned up the wavechange switch and tone control switch with De-Oxit and then put the chassis in the cabinet - finally after a couple of years! The dial looks good and even the 'shadowgraph' tuning indicator worked.

What a start to the year!

The finished receiver.

Rear view.

Closer view of the dial.